GSoC: The last one. Shareable Draft Content

The coding period has ended but has the project reached its destination? let's find out

In no time, the coding period ended. It just feels like yesterday that I became a part of Joomla and now the amazing journey came to an end! This was a great learning experience from best of people around the world and also making new friends. The best thing I learnt during this whole project was that the end results doesn't matter as you have learned something, specially from your mistakes and tried to overcome your drawbacks.

Compared to the initial proposal of the project, major goals or least achievable goal were mostly worked on till the end. Hence, it would be fair to say that all the mentioned features were not implemented on time. But still, I learnt in and out of working on a project which can be an important feature for Joomla CMS.

The central idea is to enable users to create a Shareable link for their draft articles and give this link to anyone from whom they would like to have a review. The user can view the draft just like it would appear on the website once it is published. The thing to be noted here is having share link doesn't grant any edit rights to those with whom the link is shared. It would just enable them to view the draft.

Now as the generating link part was done it was equally important that there should be something which would help users to manage these links and hence the next essential was to have a draft manager. This draft manager option would appear on articles section as a sub menu option. When clicked, the user would be able to view only those articles which have a valid share token. The draft managers would also mention the date of creation of draft with the share links for better management. That's the part of project I worked on this summer. I feel much more could have been done as mentioned in initial proposal that would have made this project a success!

Yes, this project failed and it took me some time to make peace with the fact that whatever I was working didn't reach its end result but that's OK, the experience I got is beyond comparable to a grade. It would have been wonderful if the result was otherwise but I'm not complaining! I appreciate all the feedbacks as they would only help me improve.

The motivation behind writing this article is all those amazing and encouraging words I heard from community people.

I would say that GSoC was a different experience not a difficult one. Nothing was difficult it was just different from usual thing and different in better way. I really enjoyed working on goals, weekly meets. On what I learnt from this experience, importance of time management and better communication so as to ease the workflow for everyone, being focused on tasks as well as asking for help whenever I face difficulty instead of waiting for figuring out the solution myself and waste the valuable time in this process.

I would like to keep contributing to Joomla by finishing the project, submitting the PR for an issue if I can solve the problem and help people learn Joomla and about open source in general. And yes, an unsuccessful attempt would never deter me from contributing to open source.

I would also thank my mentors, Roland and Rishi for never giving up on me and helping me every now and then.